The present invention relates to a method and system for distributing a work process over an information network to members of a virtual community.
In many business environments, work processes are split up into segments and distributed to a number of employees. Each employee is responsible for completing their segment of the work process. The segments are collected as they are completed and when all of the segments are completed, the work process is considered to have been completed.
The tasks required to complete segments of a work process often can be repetitive and boring to employees. Employees having no or little interest in their tasks, are typically less productive and difficult to keep. As a result, staffing difficulties can arise resulting in delays in the completion of work processes. Also, the costs associated with employing a large number of individuals to handle distributed work processes can be significant. Accordingly, there is a need for improving the manner in which distributed work processes are performed.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel distributed work process method and system.
According to one aspect of the present invention there is provided a method of distributing a work process on an information network comprising the steps of:
contracting members of a virtual community having access to said information network to perform tasks associated with said work process, said members having an interest in said work process;
dispatching tasks to said members requiring said members to evaluate information accessible on said information network;
receiving the evaluations of said members; and
processing the evaluations to perform said work process.
According to another aspect of the present invention there is provided a system for distributing a work process on an information network comprising:
a first subsystem to contract members of a virtual community having access to said information network to perform tasks associated with said work process, said members having an interest in said work process;
a second subsystem to dispatch tasks to said members requiring said members to evaluate information accessible on said information network and receive the evaluations of said members; and
a third subsystem to process the evaluations to perform said work process.
According to still yet another aspect of the present invention there is provided a method for assigning a generic rating to a directory containing a plurality of documents comprising the steps of:
evaluating documents in said directory one at a time and assigning a rating value to said documents;
as said quantitative values are assigned to said documents, comparing said rating values;
if said rating values are the same and after a predetermined percentage of the total number of documents in said directory have been evaluated, assigning a generic rating value to said directory that is the same as said rating values and ending the document evaluation.
The present invention provides advantages in that information accessible over the information network such as the Internet can be evaluated according to desired criteria. The desired criteria may require the information to be evaluated for accuracy and/or may require members to assign quantitative and/or subjective ratings based on content. If pages of websites are to be evaluated in order to assign maturity ratings, the maturing ratings can be used with filtering software to block access to websites containing objectionable material. The present invention also provides advantages in that errors ratings assigned to information can be detected and corrected quickly.
The present invention also provides advantages in that since virtual communities are used to evaluate information accessible via the Internet, rating biases are reduced and a degree of humanity is brought to the process. Also, a large amount of information can be evaluated at a relatively low cost.